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PUSHA-T SAYS 25 TRACKS IS CHEATING

October 12, 2018

By Dev Allen, AFROPUNK

We don’t have time to listen to these movie-length albums, and Pusha T sees them as one of the cheapest tricks in the game right now. “The idea of everybody putting like 25 tracks on an album to get the streams up, it’s such a poverty way of cheating to me,” Pusha T said during an interview at the Red Bull Music Festival.

The Pusha-T/Drake beef is, we’ll say, dormant, though you can still hear subtle shots from both sides. But this shot seemed aimed more at the industry itself. The simple math is that more streams equals more sales. (The industry equation is 1,250 streams from a project equals one album sale.). And the past year has seen Migos, Drake, and Lil Wayne drop albums with 23+ tracks, projects with three to four times the opportunity to chart than, say, Pusha’s seven-track Daytona.

Though Pusha says, that was a strategy. “I was like, you know what, we need to be totally against everything, and we need to have a whole other mantra in regard to what we’re doing.” G.O.O.D. Music’s summer ‘18 was about proving that strategy, with airtight projects from Teyana Taylor, Nas, Kid Cudi and Kanye, and Pusha T.

We’re long past the time when the majority of music sales are coming from physical goods, with streams the era’s currency. So it seems as though artists have to choose: either drop a bundled playlist of songs they call an ‘album’ for the numbers, or focus on a handful of true-album tracks and maintain the integrity of a project.